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Facebook Privacy Woes Make Little Impact On Site’s Popularity

Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at the Center for Internet & Society, is quoted on changes to Facebook's privacy policies. Brian Womack of Bloomberg reports:

Facebook Inc. has rankled politicians from Amsterdam to Washington for failing to protect personal privacy. Yet for all the criticism, users are flocking apace to the world’s largest social network.

Facebook had 519.1 million users last month, up from 411 million in September, according to ComScore Inc. And the site continued to add traffic this month, even as U.S. lawmakers, the American Civil Liberties Union and 30 European countries lodged complaints that Facebook has been reckless with personal data.

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“For Facebook and other online companies, they’ve had a self-regulatory regime with sporadic enforcement for a decade,” said Ryan Calo, who runs the Consumer Privacy Project at the Center for Internet and Society, which is housed at Stanford University. “They have to actually be concerned that Congress or the FTC will intervene in a way that actually subjects them to substantive requirements.”